The McClatchy Co. publishes 30 daily newspapers with their related print and digital operations in communities from Alaska to Florida.

By Nima Tamaddon

The death of newspapers, by cutbacks and outright disappearance, might not be newsy anymore, but the amount of effort the newspaper industry, such as McClatchy, is putting in to transform into web mobile platforms could be.

Last month, Julie Moos, a veteran online journalist, joined the McClatchy Co.’s Washington bureau as the senior digital editor to oversee such transformation in a publishing company that operates 30 daily newspapers nationwide.

After a decade working at the Poynter Institute, the online school that teaches ethics and best practices of modern journalism, Moos doesn’t believe the industrial age of journalism is over.

Julie Moos: Journalism is still in such a transitional stage that I don’t think it’s necessarily post-anything.

Photo courtesy of www.juliemoos.org

“There is certainly a contingency that believes that, but I think journalism is still in such a transitional stage that I don’t think it’s necessarily post-anything,” Moos says, in a phone interview from her office at McClatchy Washington bureau.
“I think it’s a little premature to declare that [journalism] completely moved through one stage and it’s in another.”

The latest edition of the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the Media Report, released in March 2013, said the rapid growth of mobile platforms put a lot of pressure on news organizations.
The report also shows the newspaper industry is down significantly, particularly in terms of employment — 30 percent since 2000.
The majority of people surveyed for the report, around 60 percent of the respondents, said they have heard “little or nothing about the financial problems besetting news organizations,” according to the Pew Research Center.

This finding didn’t surprise David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, who recently in an interview with MinnPost, poked fun at that notion.
“People don’t care about newspapers. I write about newspapers all the time, and if I put the word ‘newspapers’ in the lead of a column, that thing dives like a rock,” Carr said. “I’ve got to put Jesus, a gay dinosaur and puppy into a lead about newspapers to hold their attention.”

On the other hand, “if there is one hopeful sign for news,” the report states, “it is that the U.S. audience still turns to the legacy newspapers, TV stations and cable channels they have long known.”

How a legacy media such as McClatchy, with more than 150 years history, can embrace digital journalism, in a time that strong brands with solid reputations still matter, according to the State of Media Report.

To Moos, there are a lot of ways at a lot of levels to do so. She says McClatchy is interested in leveraging all of those options to serve the 30 communities where they have papers, because the style of news delivery has been changed, and it’s more dependent on digital delivery. Now, each one of those McClatchy newspapers has its own unique iPhone app.
“There are obviously new mobile opportunities both with smartphones and tablets to make news available to people, wherever they are, whenever they want it, and to provide them with different immersive story experiences,” says Moos.

In addition to new opportunities to create story forms that are different both “visually and interactively on the web,” Moos says, there are also new ways for legacy news organizations to reach people socially whether they are on Facebook catching up with family and friends or exchanging links.

What she mentioned based on her experience, regarding social media, is a major trend identified by the State of Media Report which states, “Hearing about things in the news from friends and family, whether via social media or actual word of mouth, leads to deeper news consumption.”
McClatchy survived a sharp downturn during the past decade. In the mid-2000s, before the company acquired Knight Ridder, its share price was above $75. In late 2008, with the recession that began that year, McClatchy’s share price dropped below $1.5, and the company was forced to sell several newspapers.

With all that in mind, Moos believes that the transitional period of journalism is still on the way and that is the main reason why she personally is not ready to declare that the journalism on the whole is post anything yet.

“Not only because it’s still in transition, but also different parts of the news industry are different parts of that transition,” she says. “So you have this overall disruption that is going on mostly universally with business, and how people get their news and information, and then how we provide it.”
For the next edition of the State of Media Report, as an expert in digital journalism, Moos expects certain transitions to continue, like further paywalls and subscription models.
“I expect that mobile consumption of news to increase as the trend has been and same for social. There is one thing that it is a kind of intriguing and I wouldn’t predict which way it is going to go,” she says, referring to a new trend of online long format reporting which started with the “Snow Fall” at the New York Times.

“I think that form of native digital storytelling will certainly continue to grow and more news organizations will experiment with it. We have already seen some at that the Washington Post and other places experimented with that more immersive form of storytelling,” she says.
What she thinks is interesting is that both independent trends of social flow of information and long format reporting are rapidly growing.
“I don’t know if they would move toward some middle ground or if they will continue independent of each other, which may might.”

McClatchy in the course of history.

In 2006, McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder, which at the time was the second-largest newspaper company in the United States.
(Picture: St. Petersburg Times - Mar 13, 2006)

V.S. McClatchy was one of the major figures in the anti-Japanese movement, in the post-World War I. The son of James McClatchy, founder of the liberal Sacramento Bee newspaper, V.S. McClatchy served as the publisher of the newspaper until his death in 1938. (Picture: The New York Times - September 26, 1919)

McClatchy went public in 1988. Under C. K. McClatchy's guidance, the company's revenues increased from $192 million in 1983 to $283.8 million in 1986, while net multiplied from $6.9 million to over $45 million. (Picture: The Sunday Telegraph - Jan 31, 1988)

Eleanor McClatchy was president of the McClatchy newspapers from 1936 until 1978. She was the youngest daughter of Charles Kenny McClatchy. Under her watch the company expanded its interest to six daily newspapers, four radio stations and one television station. (Picture: Lodi News-Sentinel - Oct 18, 1980)

As a big fan of Poynter Online, and the service it is offering to educate journalists around the world on a daily basis, I think it’s not easy to change your professional path from a judging position (at Poynter) and come under the radar of other media critics.

When I asked her about the potential challenges she has faced at McClatchy she said “it’s been just a month, it’s still in progress.”

But she explained how her previous position at Poynter was different from the new one. “Most of my time at Poynter was spent running a website with business responsibilities, technology responsibilities, and editorial responsibilities. We were a tiny team working to do almost everything ourselves,” she said. “McClatchy is a very different situation. There is a large reporting team separate from the website. There is a centralized technology hub that provides support. And business responsibilities are other parts of the company, not with me. So it’s very different from Poynter in a lot of ways.”

I made an interactive map with Google Fusion tables to showcase how big the market is for the 31 McClatchy papers that stretch across America from Alaska to Florida and from Pennsylvania to California.

Also made a photo gallery to showcase the depth of history at McClatchy.